Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx agentmods add skills/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering/debug-a-silent-failurenpx skills add everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering --skill debug-a-silent-failuregit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineeringWhat it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00048 | $0.01699 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00024 | $0.00849 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00010 | $0.00340 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00170 |
Grade A, and why
debug-a-silent-failure scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 154 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Debug a silent failure
Most outages announce themselves. The expensive ones do not.
The signature is always the same shape: the thing that should have happened did not happen, and no layer said anything. No stack trace, no non-zero exit, no alert. Just an absence — and absence does not page anyone.
🔴 In this class of failure, the silence IS the symptom. Stop waiting for an error to appear. Start asking which component should have complained, and why it did not.
When to use this
- "It should be running" and it is not
- A change was applied and had no visible effect
- A log stopped — not errors, everything
- A job, a report, a sync did not produce output and nothing failed
- Something was broken for days and nobody noticed
- A count is zero and nobody knows if zero is correct
The procedure
1. State the missing event precisely. "The nightly export did not appear." Not "exports are broken". You are about to walk a chain, and you need to know what you are looking for at each link.
2. Walk the chain backwards, from the missing output to the trigger. At each link ask two questions:
- Did this link run at all?
- If it ran and failed, would anything have recorded that?
The second question is the one that finds it. Silent failures live at the link where the answer is no.
3. Look for the layer that swallows. Something is converting a failure into a non-event. Usual suspects, in order of how often they are the answer:
| Swallower | What it turns into silence |
|---|---|
| A success exit code on a failed operation | The supervisor sees a clean finish and does nothing |
| A restart policy scoped to failures only | A process exiting cleanly is never brought back |
| A cache in front of the broken thing | Health checks keep passing off stale content |
| A transformation applied in the wrong order | The later step matches nothing and reports success |
| An event that never crosses a boundary | One node acts, the others never hear |
| Configuration that produces zero work | Nothing runs, nothing fails, nothing is reported |
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 2d ago First seen · 154 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 05494d1c56a5
debug-a-silent-failure is a skill published in the GitHub repository everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering (2 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 1,699 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.
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